Kin
by Anne Elvey
Five Islands Press, 2014
The kinship Elvey forges between her poems and ecological criticism lends both rigour and reverence to her first full-length collection of poetry. There is a radiant stasis at the core of her poems that encourages the reader to listen to the susurration of multiple, overlapping conversations to which Elvey is contributing.
Elvey is a significant voice in Australian ecological theology. Her research and poetry blog, Leaf Litter, charts a series of important papers and pertinent thoughts about the link between ‘teaching, research and writing as a response to ecological crisis’. The most recent feature of this blog is Elvey’s presentation from the Ecofaith conference in May 2014, entitled ‘On (not) speaking about God ecologically’. In this paper, she considers scholarship on the kinship model, most importantly, extending eco-theologian Denis Edwards’ work on ‘challenging the model of domination and exploitation’. Elvey’s Kin puts into practice Edwards’ suggestion that we ‘have much to learn about kin-ship from the traditional cultures of indigenous peoples.’ Her ‘Claimed by Country’ sequence addresses, in her own words, her responses as:
a non-Aboriginal woman to the places I lived in and visited and my sense
of being “claimed” in part through a practice of attentiveness to the places that
are “country” for their Aboriginal, traditional owners.
